NWSL to the Bay is a go for 2024.
On Tuesday, the NWSL announced that it has officially awarded expansion rights to an investment group located in the Bay Area, led by investment firm Sixth Street as the club’s majority investor. Former players Brandi Chastain, Leslie Osborne, Danielle Slaton and Aly Wagner, who have been working on the expansion efforts in Northern California for the last three years or so, are partnered with Sixth Street, and will serve on the club’s board. That board will also include Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta (who has also joined as a “strategic investor”), former NBA and WNBA executive Rick Welts and former San Francisco Giants executive vice president Staci Slaughter. Alan Waxman, CEO of Sixth Street, and Wagner will co-chair the club’s board; Waxman will also serve as the team’s representative on the NWSL board of governors, with Wagner serving as alternate.
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“This is important, the reason why we’re making the single largest investment ever in global women’s sports and definitely global women’s soccer — we’re investing $125 million of new money into the team — is because we think this is massively, structurally undervalued,” Waxman told The Athletic ahead of the club’s expansion announcement.
The new team’s name and identity will be revealed later on in the process of building the club.
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Waxman pointed to the Women’s Euro, Champions League final, the NWSL’s attendance and viewership numbers as reasons for their bullishness. The inflection point is happening, Waxman said, and that $125 million figure might look big now, but “in five years, it’s gonna look like small potatoes. So that’s how we got involved. That’s the thesis.”
Sixth Street has other investments in soccer already, with Real Madrid, Barcelona (remember the levers?), and in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs. They’re also majority investor in Legends, a sports and live venue experience company that has partnerships across multiple professional leagues.
Previously, the WNBA had claimed the largest single investment for a women’s sports property when they announced a $75 million capital raise in February 2022.
Waxman broke down Sixth Streets’s $125 million investment, with $53 million of that covering the NWSL’s expansion fee. Beyond that fee, Bay Area has also committed to build “a world-class practice facility” that Waxman estimates will take $35 to $50 million of their initial investment, and Legends will help advise the club on this front. “The rest of the money has been invested on the company’s balance sheet, and that will be invested to build a team,” Waxman said.
The location of that training facility and the final selection of which stadium the team will use as its home venue haven’t been announced yet, though the expansion team has already been heavily linked to the San Jose Earthquakes’ stadium, PayPal Park.
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The new NWSL team starting in 2024 won’t be the only option for women’s soccer in the Bay Area, with the Oakland Soul playing in USL’s W League, as well as The Town FC having announced their own NWSL aspirations. There’s also a hugely established women’s collegiate soccer scene in the Bay, one Chastain, Osborne, Slaton and Wagner know well as Santa Clara products.
There’s an emotional component, especially, for the four players involved. The defining emotions days before launch were mostly excitement, pride, anticipation. Memories of attending games in the Bay Area in their own childhoods that stuck with them as they turned pro, knowing that they were about to unlock this same core memory for a whole new generation.
Wagner recalled a night during the 1994 men’s World Cup in which Brazil and their fans overtook the streets. Wagner was 14 at the time.
“I went out and I experienced, for the first time, what that passion was like, what that connection was like to the spirit of football and the global game, the fervor and community,” she said.
Even the opportunity to provide a similar experience to the community is deeply important.
“It gives me chills,” she continued. “It makes me know we’re on the brink of something incredibly special, and being able to provide that is more than any individual achievements that I’ve ever had in my career. This is different.”
Wagner was the link between the four players who had already been working extensively on a potential NWSL expansion bid and Sixth Street. She met Waxman’s wife, Charlotte Zanders Waxman, as the Waxmans initially considered a personal investment. According to Alan, Charlotte was the one who suggested it might be the right fit for Sixth Street.
Alan Waxman met with Wagner, and he was interested — but wanted to verify what she was telling him, not just about the expansion team but the NWSL.
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“They did their due diligence and ultimately, they saw where we were headed,” Wagner said. “They saw it was an undervalued market and asset, and there was opportunity. It became an incredible partnership that has us with soccer experience and the vision, which is really key partnered with Sixth Street matching our vision and backing it with resources.”
Sixth Street’s decision to partner feels a lot like validation, too.
“That’s the difference when you talk about change, like true systemic, real change that can happen,” Slaton said. “It’s with all of us. It’s with the people who are shouting from the rooftops in advocating for women’s sports and women’s football for a long time. But it also takes the recognition of allies to step in when they have the resources and say, ‘Yes, I support this and I’m going to put the full weight of what I have behind it.’”
The four former players bring a deep history and knowledge, and that will be a resource for the entire organization. But Sixth Street’s outsider perspective also has value.
“We don’t have any of the history. We just look at all things as an investor. This has global brand potential. The best men’s teams in the world, they’re global brands,” Waxman said.
That same potential extends to the women in the same way. In Waxman’s view, streaming and social media have broken down the barriers to access women’s sports, and have made the potential radically different than even five or 10 years ago.
“Previously, the only way these teams could connect with their fans was if they would come into the stadium,” he said. “That whole wall has collapsed, and that’s a structural change.”
Sixth Street, Waxman said, is always looking for structural changes.
“Again, completely unemotional. I don’t know the history. As an investor, if you extrapolate the history, you’re never going to be a good investor. You’ve got to think about the future, and you’ve got to think about structural changes.”
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Osborne is the only one of the four ex-players to have played in the NWSL, though Wagner certainly has plenty of familiarity with it as a broadcaster.
“The league is stable, but there’s still so much growth and so much opportunity,” Osborne said. “We think that this team, our ownership group, and what we want to do to continue to elevate the NWSL, having a team in the Bay Area, it’s the perfect opportunity. I’m proud that I played in that first year of the NWSL. And now, celebrating 10 years, and thinking about what the next 10 years will look like — how players don’t have to worry as much if there’s going to be a league they can play in? That’s massive. None of us had that.”
Chastain, who was a founding player of WUSA in 2001 and spent all three seasons of that league with the Bay Area (then San Jose) CyberRays, plus a season with WPS’ FC Gold Pride in 2009, spoke to the fact that this new NWSL club will be the third iteration of women’s pro soccer in the Bay Area.
“Foundationally, those two previous leagues were helpful in making the NWSL as solid as it could be,” Chastain said. “You need to learn a lot along the way. We had fabulous people who believed in women’s soccer, but we didn’t have infrastructure, we didn’t have the business side. Those two factors, I think, are transformational and really critical to the success that we will have.”
The history of the game, of the pro game in the Bay, while sometimes painful, can be a gift. Chastain promised, “We are going to do it different and better than ever before.”
Slaton, who has led the implementation of recommendations stemming from U.S. Soccer’s independent investigation of the NWSL last year, has a unique viewpoint into the league as a former player and changemaker.
“The first 10 years of this league, from a league perspective and also sadly, from a player’s safety perspective, have been about survival,” she said. “Now it’s a matter of shifting all of that energy that was spent on just trying to survive. Now all of that energy gets to be on this league thriving.”
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As for the NWSL, in Monday’s announcement, the league noted that despite the announcements of Utah Royals FC returning to the league as team No. 13, and now Bay Area as team No. 14, the expansion process will continue as they look for two more teams. Boston’s expansion bid has not been formally announced, but is expected to become team No. 15 and return the league to one of its original markets. For NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman, expansion right now makes sense for the league for a few reasons.
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“Number one, it allows for the NWSL to continue to be the tip of the spear globally in the women’s game, because we know our superpower is our uniqueness and our structure, in that we are independent from not just the men’s teams, but also from the (U.S. Soccer) federation,” Berman told The Athletic.
That independence allows the NWSL to sell its own assets, whether that’s via sponsorships, tickets or even franchise rights. No other league, Berman said, can do it like the NWSL can right now.
“We control our own destiny. We are completely and totally in control of our footprint and how we choose to grow. That, coupled with the size of our country, requires that we be thoughtful about our national footprint and ensure that we are in enough places and spaces to continue to build relevance.”
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Northern California, between its geography and history, made sense through this lens. And Sixth Street’s buy-in and investment isn’t just a win for the four players who led the expansion efforts, but for the league itself, too.
“Alan’s perspective on behalf of Sixth Street brings unquestionable validation to the value of the NWSL,” Berman said. “He cannot, and would not, be able to make an investment decision for any reason other than it being a smart investment. His investment thesis is rooted in data that benchmarks our league against other investments, both within the sports industry and outside the sports industry, that led him to the conclusion that this is not only the time to get in, but going to be one of the fastest growing investments in his portfolio.”
That alone, Berman said, should help answer any lingering questions anyone might have on if the NWSL has turned the corner on the league’s trajectory moving forward.
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There’s also the benefit of being able to draw upon the experiences of Chastain, Osborne, Slaton and Wagner, who Berman said are entering the NWSL in their news roles with a “thirst for getting it right,” but also an appreciation of how far the league has come. “I think this is a super important part of this transformation we’re undergoing,” Berman said. “We can’t solve everything overnight, and we have to be super strategic and smart about the things we’re going to prioritize and tackle. They have really interesting ideas given their experience.”
On Tuesday, those four players — now backed so wholeheartedly by Sixth Street’s investment — will keep working on building the team with a tight timeline now officially set.
That hasn’t escaped Slaton’s attention.
“Maybe I’m the only one who will say this, but I’m a little bit all over the place. I’m so proud, so pumped, so excited, but I’m also nervous,” she said. “There’s a little bit of nerves around the work that is ahead. The fact that we have a soccer game nine months from now!”
The team’s still a few key hires away from their first player signing, but it’s only a matter of time. Asked to provide her best pitch for a player who might be considering the Bay Area as a potential home for 2024 and beyond, Chastain started laughing, declining to answer for fear of immediately breaking a NWSL rule on tampering.
“I don’t want to get us in trouble before we even start this damn thing!”
But she pointed to the Bay’s history of champions, and Wagner stepped in with their aspirations of ensuring that players will have every resource they could need, including post-soccer career help and, of course, a technical and support staff to oversee a team that “plays the most attractive, entertaining, winning brand of football.”
“That’s the beautiful colors of it,” Chastain said. “But really, those players have to be determined. It’s gonna be challenging, it’s gonna be hard. I think that’s what makes Sixth Street who they are, I think that’s what made the four of us who we are. There’s this beautiful collision of the art and the grace and the glory and the rhythm of the game that goes along with the hard work and the determination of the start-up culture that lives here. We have the best of all those worlds, and that’s why we’ll back up easily what we’re saying.”
Required reading
(Photo: Terrell Lloyd)
